Release of Medical 0.1.3 and OpenERP v6 integration

I'm happy to announce the release of Medical 0.1.3, with includes bug fixes and improvements in Patient Hospitalization Management, Laboratory Administration and PoS / Billing, among others.

It all looks like that Medical v1 and OpenERP v6 will come out very closely in dates.

For the last weeks, I've been working on adapting Medical to the upcoming version of OpenERP v6. I have work on the code, the views and the documentation, so I can say now that most of the code is v6 compatible ( including wizards).

Medical 0.1.3 has been released today. From this point on, all the active development (trunk) will be done in OpenERP / OpenObject v6.

The current trunk has been moved to branch openerp5. This will be based in medical 0.1.3 and it's a maintenance version, so bugfixes will be applied to it.

I invite all of you who are actively developing Medical to download the latest OpenERP repository and install Medical on it. Please document the new functionality on the Wiki (http://medical.wiki.sourceforge.net). I already documented the installation process for Medical under OpenERP v6.

This approach is the best way to keep Medical uptodate with the latest OpenERP developments, improvements and functionality. Of course, we will keep the 5x version for people that don't want to migrate at this point.

The new online demo of Medical version , compatible with openerp v6 will be available soon at the GNU Solidario portal. Same user, ports, etc..

About Medical

Medical is a free (GPL license), centralized Health and Hospital Information System for OpenERP that provides the following functionality :

Electronic Medical Record (EMR)

Hospital Information System (HIS)

Health Information System

Medical is part of GNU Solidario ( http://gnusolidario.org/en ) . GNU Solidario is a NGO that delivers education and health solutions with free software.

In this view, it's easy to look for patient's locations and status in the hospital. The colors visually differentiate the type of admissions.

We have also improve other sections, like vaccinations. Thanks to Andrew Gledhill (NHS) who proposed the addition of the vaccine lot and expiration date. Actually, the vaccine is integrated to the product, so all the production lot, traceability, and procurement is automated. Special controls for vaccine expiration dates have been put in place now.

I could write many pages, but it all comes down to one concept: ethics.
When I talk about Free Software, I talk about not only about freedom, but also community and good will from the software author. The latter probably is the most important one.
You write Free Software because you want to contribute to the community. It's an act of social activism. It's about sharing and helping out.
This April I got a mail from Chris Larsen, a doctor working in Rwanda, where he was asking OpenERP the scripts to upgrade to 6.x, since they needed to have the latest Medical version. The response he got was that the scripts were not publicly available anymore. If they wanted to upgrade, they would have to pay a support contract to OpenERP. This is the typical example of a vendor lock-in. They change the rules (even the license) and then the user becomestheir prisoner.
That very same day I started the implementation of GNU Health (previously called "medical") in the Tryton platform. B…